Pastor's Page: April 21, 2009

Graciousness 4: The Assist

Philadelphia 76s point guard Maurice Cheeks dished out 7,392 assists in the course of his basketball career, but his best one came 10 years after he retired. On April 28, 2003, Cheeks, then coach of the Trailblazers, stood on the sideline as 13-year-old Natalie Gilbert began singing the national anthem before a game with the Mavericks. Natalie got as far as "the twilight's last gleaming" when she froze, forgetting the words. In her silence the crowd began to whoop it up, and she buried her face in the microphone as though trying to hide. But Cheeks quickly went over to her and began singing, "Whose broad stripes and bright stars...". He draped his arm around her, and they finished the song together as the whole crowd joined in. Watch it on YouTube, and you can see for yourself why Cheeks is rightly regarded in basketball circles as a great class act.

A gracious person stands ready at a moment's notice to provide an assist like that for someone stuck in a bad situation. It can be very simple. The other day as I finished a transaction at the bank, the guy behind me said, "Excuse me, sir?" and apologetically noted that my collar was up in back. I had neglected to fold it down over my tie. I thanked him and fixed it, and told him I never would have known the collar was amiss if he had not alerted me. I was reminded of the quick work of a friend of mine who, when sitting in a high school physics class, saw that his teacher's fly was open. Rather than embarrassing him with "Mr. Johnson, your zipper!", he hastily scribbled a note and placed it atop an assignment he was handing in. The teacher soon found an excuse to leave the room and came back adjusted.

The classroom is one of those settings that provides daily opportunities for gracious assists on the part of both teacher and student. When I was at Trinity I was very impressed by the way several professors managed to respond thoughtfully to the tangled verbiage of over-caffeinated seminarians. Had I been more gracious myself, I might have gone up to them afterward and said, "Thank you, Professor. I like how you were able to make sense of that question!" I can only imagine how many times they had to resist the temptation to stare at a student and mutter, Snape-ishly, "Go regroup your fuddled thoughts and come back with something coherent."

I believe most students probably don't realize that their teachers need assists too. Scholar and author Scot McKnight used to tell us that when he first started teaching he was afraid to go to class. Professors realize that they will get evaluated. They probably look themselves up on RateMyTeacher, and know very well when they are bombing. By the time I got to graduate school I learned the trick of raising my hand and posing lots of questions to struggling teachers, and that always seemed to energize them. It was a matter of helping out a teacher whose brain was good but needed picking.

Look for opportunities to give an assist. Jesus will some day say to the righteous, "I was hungry and you gave me to eat, thirsty and you gave me to drink, in prison and you visited me," etc. He might also say, "I was a 13-year-old who forgot the national anthem, and you came to my side and helped me to finish it."

Pastor's Page: April 7, 2009

Graciousness 3: Just Paying Attention

When I was 14 I was reprimanded by a teacher for something very rude I had done. While other freshmen were giving oral presentations I took out a book and started reading it. Believe it or not, my motive for ignoring my classmates was good. I myself hated, hated, pathologically hated giving speeches - the thought of talking publicly made me so nervous I'd want to crawl in a hole. What a horror to have everyone looking at you while you perspired and sputtered and turned red! So, in the spirit of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," I deliberately paid no attention to the speakers, even as (so I thought) I wanted them to pay no attention to me.

Boy was that dumb. The teacher was right to insist that I put the book away. And so I learned, by means of rebuke, what naturally gracious people know without being taught: Generally, people don't like being ignored when they're speaking. They like being listened to. Even I like being listened to now. I get flummoxed if someone reads a newspaper during Sunday School, or goes out for coffee as soon as the sermon starts. But who am I to complain? It is probably karma for my own rudeness!

Back in the early 70s my mother celebrated my father's gracious spirit with an essay she wrote about the things he did to make her happy, shaping his deeds into words of counsel for husbands who had "more love to offer than money." One of the bullet points was: "Listen patiently, try not to yawn, while one of her loquacious relatives rambles endlessly on." It is a mark of a man's character that he can listen patiently to a woman's boring relative, not merely when he is trying to woo her, but when he has been married to her for 25 years and no longer stands to gain anything by it!

Of course there are limits to how long even a polite individual can listen to some people. When my sister feared calling an acquaintance because she knew the woman would monopolize her time for a whole afternoon, I said, "I can help! Just let me know when you are about to call. Then I'll call you 15 minutes later, say that I need to talk to you right away [to help you end the call on the other line, but we'll leave that unsaid], so you can get back to your friend and say, 'Hey, that's my brother, he wants to talk to me right now.'" She declined my offer, and, instead, patiently endured a long listen.

D. L. Moody once spared some congregants a long listen by boldly interrupting a droner. At an evangelistic rally a guest minister was praying an impossibly long prayer and people were getting restless. A physician in the audience, W. T. Grenfell, was so bored he was about to walk out. But Moody, sensing the problem, sprang to his feet and announced, "As our brother finishes his prayer, let us sing a hymn!" (Grenfell, relieved, stayed, made a profession of faith in Christ that night, and eventually became a medical missionary to Canada.)

Within limits set by prudence, it is usually a good and gracious thing to let others say their piece. The Bible says that God extends the grace of focused attention to witless mortal sinners like us. It is a fact about him that amazed King David, who asked in Psalm 8:4, "What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?" (Or, as Eugene Petersen put it, "Why do you bother with us? Why take a second look our way?"). But he does pay attention to us somehow, and the Holy Spirit even intercedes on our behalf "with groans that words cannot express" (Romans 8:26).

I don't know why he "groans". Maybe it is because so many of our prayers are such a tedious test of his patience!

Pastor's Page: March 31, 2009

Graciousness 2: The Art Of Cover

When I studied linguistics I learned that speech errors can be an interesting source of data, because it turns out that even our mispronunciations and grammatical screw-ups follow certain rules embedded in our minds. If I garble the word "shrug" in rapid speech, for example, I might say "shug", "sug", or "shruk", but probably not "srug" because "sr" does not exist in English as a word-initial consonant cluster, and so my brain does not have easy access to it.

I heard about a professor who captured on tape a fascinating error from a native speaker of some foreign language, and he played it over and over for his students so they could hear the crucial mistake and see the point it illustrated. But about the 5th time he pressed the "play" button, the native speaker, who was present, jumped up and ran out of the room crying. What was for others a mere linguistic novelty was for her a grievous shame, and hearing it again and again in front of everybody was unbearable. We were all warned from that incident, "Be careful not to replay people's mistakes in front of others."

There is a principle of graciousness to be gleaned from that warning. We all have things that cause us shame - stupid comments we make, sins we commit, errors in judgment we manifest. Graceless people call attention to those things and replay them in front of everybody, while gracious people cover them up for us. Gracious people master the appropriate use of the passive voice, saying things like, "I'm afraid this got broken" rather than, "Lundquist dropped this." They can speak in exquisite generalities, explaining, "There may have been some confusion about directions" rather than, "Paul got lost again." They plant us in the protection of the plural, saying, "Our team shooting percentage was a little low" rather than, "Preacher bricked a bunch of shots."

St. Peter wrote, "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins" (1 Peter 4:8). It also covers over (by declining to mention) our lisp, our limp, our lack of height or surplus of weight, the ravages of our advancing years, or any of those bodily features of ours (we know them already!) that the opposite sex might find unappealing.

A heartbreaking scene from The Elephant Man shows Doctor Frederick Treves displaying the misshapen Joseph Merrick before his medical colleagues, outlining in detail every ghastly bulge of bone and warp of flesh. Only later does Treves come to understand that Merrick is a man of sensitivity and not a lab specimen, and that the manner in which he had put him on display was cruel. It brings to mind something my brother once said - though I'm afraid I can only remember five words of it, and I forget completely the context and story they were attached to. They are good words, and can be attached to many stories, and those who want to be gracious will often find them useful. They are, "Let him have his dignity."

Pastor's Page: March 24, 2009

Graciousness 1: Putting A Stranger At Ease

A friend suggested that I write a few words about graciousness, and I will try to oblige. It happens to be one of my favorite virtues. When I see someone practicing it I feel like Salieri listening to the music of Mozart, because I think, "Oh, that's good, very good - I wish I could do that!" Lord willing, I'll spend the next few weeks outlining some features of gracious behavior.

One thing that gracious people do is put guests and strangers at ease. Jerks of course do the opposite - they make them uncomfortable. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader C. S. Lewis writes that the bully Eustace Scrubb was glad to hear that his cousins were coming, because "he knew that there are dozens of ways to give people a bad time if you are in your own home and they are only visitors." This is true. When you are on your own turf - home, school, church, basketball court - you get to set all the terms and guests can't do anything about it, which makes it easy to be mean to them. Like at the University of Iowa stadium, where school officials painted everything in the visitors' locker room - walls, carpet, shower stalls, urinals, everything - an unmanly hue of pink just to annoy visiting teams.

But ungracious people find that they do not need to be actively hostile when simple negligence will do the job. Some churches are masters of this. I like to tell the story of the time I visited a church in North Dakota 25 years ago. I arrived early, went to Sunday School and the worship service, stayed afterwards, and literally not one person said hello to me. Shortly before I left, a man greeted me and we spoke briefly - and it turned out to be a first-time visitor like myself! So I never went back. By contrast, I recall the thoughtful practice of a gracious pastor I knew in college. He said that at church events he always went to the bulletin board to see if anyone was hanging out there. He explained that when new people couldn't find anyone to talk to, they tended to go read notices and missionary letters on the bulletin board because it was so awkward to stand around doing nothing when everyone else was talking to people they already knew.

A new friend helped me like that once. Shortly before my wedding I was taken out to dinner by friends of my wife who had all known each other for years. At the restaurant they spoke, at length, and exclusively to each other, about friends of theirs from high school. I sat silently of course with nothing to contribute. But when Clark Hawley arrived he started talking to me and deliberately turned the conversation toward mutual interests. (Afterward he mentioned how displeased he was that his friends would invite me to dinner and do nothing but talk about people I had never heard of!) Clark's technique was flawless, and I have tried to imitate it and teach it to my sons. A gracious man at dinner tailors his conversation to include everyone - especially the guest who lacks the common experience of old friends.

In The Last Battle C. S. Lewis illustrates the graciousness of Jewel the Unicorn by the way the kind creature treats Puzzle, a slow-witted donkey: "Jewel, being a Unicorn and therefore one of the noblest and most delicate of beasts, had been very kind to [Puzzle], talking to him about things of the sort they could both understand like grass and sugar and the care of one's hoofs."

God grant us all that graciousness of spirit that welcomes the stranger, seeks common ground with him, and does everything possible to put him at ease.

Pastor's Page: March 17, 2009

Anger With God

When my father passed away suddenly my mother was asked if she was angry with God, and she said no. She wasn't denying her inner feelings, or giving some pious answer for fear of being thought wicked. She was simply stating a fact. Though distraught and grief-stricken and inconsolable, she wasn't angry. Sadness is not anger.

I can't remember her words - this was 29 years ago - but I do remember the gist of her reply concerning those who thought she was "holding something back," that it would be healthier if she "let it out" and told God what she thought about what he had done to her. She explained, "Billions of women have been widowed, many tragically. Who am I to say it should never happen to me? Everyone dies. How dare I celebrate God's goodness while others suffer, but challenge him as soon as it's my turn?"

Somehow, over the years, it became "authentic" to rail against God - like when the preacher played by Robert Duvall in The Apostle shouted, "I love you Lord, I love you, but I'm mad at you!" If you type "angry with God" into a search engine you will find advice like this: "We can be completely honest toward God with our thoughts and feelings. And God is big enough to take it all. God won't punish us for being hurt and angry, even hurt and angry at God." I found a pastor graciously trying to answer a letter that read: "Back in April I got a little basset hound pup, that pup became my life, my only friend. He got sick June the fifth and died June the twelfth. Night and day I prayed and prayed believing and knowing that Christ could have saved him, but he didn't...I tried to make the death a sweet smell to the Lord, but as the hours pass I grow more and more angry. I feel horrible saying this, but I am angry at God." The pastor did not respond (nor would I, though I'd be tempted): "You jackass. Repent. Have you never contemplated other people's grief? Between April when you got your puppy and June when it passed away, do you know how many children died of starvation and cancer? Your grief over your loss is perfectly understandable; your anger is not. How is it that you were perfectly ok with God while all those children were dying, but now that your puppy is gone, you think you got a raw deal? Oh - you say you never thought of that. Well think about it, you self-absorbed wretch."

Anger with God often results from frustrated expectations - expectations we never had a right to cherish in the first place. We thought (assumed? demanded?) that our children would not die before us, that our spouses would remain faithful, that we would not succumb to degenerative disease, that God would certainly not plant some desire in our heart (say, to have children, or make homosexual love, or grow a church) and then actively frustrate it through infertility, his law, or life's contrary circumstances. In the play Amadeus, Antonio Salieri explains to a priest how he came to rage against the Almighty: "All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing - and then made me mute! Why? Tell me that. If he didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire (like a lust in my body!), and then deny me the talent?"

I do not claim to be able to answer that, but I do know enough to say that anger with God is always senseless and wrong. It is senseless because, whenever I am inclined to think that God has been unfair, I always come back to the question, "Where did I get this idea of fairness? Who taught my mind to distinguish between fair and unfair?" The answer is God himself - through the means of conscience and tradition and law. In railing against him I'd be railing against the very source of the moral instinct within me that despises injustice! I'd be sawing away at the trunk of the branch I'm sitting on. Even if we think of the issue merely in organic terms, a complaint against God can only be formulated by using the brain cells he gives us, with the lungs and larynx and tongue he provides, through the air he supplies for breath. We are not independent of him. He made us and everything else. Therefore, the only thing with which we could strike at him would be a weapon that he himself placed in our hands. And he made the hands!

So anger with God seems senseless to me for philosophical reasons; it is also morally wrong for reasons articulated by John Piper: "Anger at a person always implies strong disapproval. If you are angry at me, you think I have done something I should not have done. This is why being angry at God is never right. It is wrong - always wrong - to disapprove of God for what he does and permits...We may weep over the pain. We may be angry at sin and Satan. But God does only what is right." Correct. Just as the truly Honorable must never provoke our contempt, and the truly Pure must never provoke our disdain, so also the truly Good must never call forth our wrath. It isn't right.

Pastor's Page: March 10, 2009

In Praise Of Duty

The other day I was listening to a radio program that played hits from the 30s and 40s, and heard an interesting song where "Jazz Singer" Al Jolson extolled his beloved's good looks. At one point he croons,

If...I'm faithful to you 
It's not through a sense of duty 
You are too beautiful 
And I am too drunk on beauty

I told my son Ben, "Listen to this! He thinks he's paying her a compliment by telling her it's her beauty that inspires his faithfulness. He's not being true to her because he has to, because it's his duty, because there is something inside him that forces him to be faithful no matter who she is or how she behaves or what she looks like - but because she's so beautiful!" And Ben answered, smartly of course, "What happens then when she is no longer beautiful?" Exactly. Maybe then she would appreciate it if his motivation had been duty all along.

Duty is a good thing, and there is no shame in being motivated by it. Duty stands strong when other motivations weaken and fall. But there are reasons why we are suspicious of it and would prefer not to reveal that it is the efficient cause of our behavior. It seems so prosaic and unromantic. We even feel insulted (certainly not complimented!) when we learn that someone did right by us not because we inspired it but because he was simply "doing his job". He would have done the same even if we weren't worthy or handsome or smart or kind. "Oh. I thought I was special. I guess whether I am or not is beside the point - that's just the kind of man he is."

About six weeks ago (see the January 27 essay, "Wait, Seriously?") I argued with a respondent who seemed to object to the holy status I gave to duty. He (She?) wrote that while many of us are tempted to promiscuity, "we choose not to pursue that not out of some religiously ascetic sense of self-denial, but because we've found something better." I find danger lurking in those innocuous words. If we can give to "duty" the pejorative label "religiously ascetic sense of self-denial", and persuade ourselves that there is a higher motive to be embraced while this lower one is dismissed, we may find that that exalted "something better" (say a warm, loving, mutually respectful give-and-take relationship) is quite unable to sustain a man's ability to care for his wife when she is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's.

Monday I heard a WMBI preacher tell us, "'The Word of the Lord is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword' - but be honest, is it like that for you when you read it? Don't you sometimes just read it out of duty? Well today we'll tell you how to change that..." and I started shouting at the radio "No! No! Not that stupid line of rhetoric again! Stop it!" Never make people feel sheepish or guilty or inadequate about submitting to the call of duty. Without it, lots of Christians would never read their Bibles at all. Duty is a good thing. Like the weird guy on that viral internet video who lamented the public abuse of poor Brittany Spears, I say, "LEAVE DUTY ALONE!"

Pastor's Page: March 3, 2009

Now It Means Something To Me

My son Ben once asked me if I had ever changed my mind about anything big. He knew I was mystified by people who managed to dismiss convictions they once held dear even though they could not be bothered to articulate reasons for the change. I think he also perceived me as one who did not move easily from one spot to another.
But I have changed, everyone has, and though I had no good answer for him then I have been able to think of one now. Over the years I have done a U-turn on the value of participating in the Lord's Supper. Once it meant nothing to me; now it has become the centerpiece for my worship of God.
When I was very young, Communion annoyed me. In the church our family attended we celebrated it once a month after the service. When the sermon ended, I just wanted to go home and eat lunch and watch a game on TV. Communion stretched out the time spent sitting in that pew a whole 15 minutes as we waited for the plates to be passed: "Come on, let's chew the cracker and drink the thimble of grape juice so we can go already." Then we moved to a church where Communion was served just four times a year, and that seemed like an improvement.
But then in college I was blessed to attend a Brethren fellowship where we partook of the bread and the cup every Sunday. Communion there was not "tacked on" to the worship hour: it was part of a separate 45-minute service before Sunday School. We prayed quietly, sang a few hymns a cappella, listened to Scripture, confessed our faults, contemplated Christ, and ate and drank the symbols of him.
That was the start of my change in attitude. Now more than 25 years later I'm positively thankful for regular opportunities to partake of the Lord's Supper. Some reasons:
(1) It is an act of obedience that I can actually do without too much difficulty. I am one who finds the Christian life hard, who wishes it were easier to submit to God, whose conscience rightly reprimands both active iniquities and countless sins of omission. It is a relief for someone like me to see a commandment like "Do this in remembrance of me" and realize that it is an absolute piece of cake, a walk in the park, a fat pitch down the middle. Even I can obey this one! All I have to do is show up on Sunday and thank Jesus as I take the bread and drink the cup. Given that so many commandments are hard, isn't it a joy to have one that's a gimme, a two-inch putt?
(2) The Lord's Supper is a time when I am compelled to think of Jesus and honor him and thank him. Do I do that with appropriate regularity and discipline on my own? Probably not. Every day my head fills with thoughts that I know are vapid, mundane and insignificant. But by regularly participating in the Lord's Supper I guarantee that, at least once a month, a worthy thought will hold my attention: "Jesus Christ, righteous Son of God, died for me, unrighteous sinner. Praise be to him."
(3) It connects me to other believers like nothing else. Perhaps the most meaningful times of Communion I ever celebrated were in the home of an elderly Rumanian couple. The wife was blind, wheelchair-bound, diseased and soon to die. But how her face lit up when she heard my voice! And what an honor to share with her and her husband the tangible reminders of Christ! Outside of Christ it is hard to see how we would ever meet or have any connection at all. But in Holy Communion, when we directed our hearts not toward each other but toward Jesus, we found the Lord creating between us a mystic bond of fellowship that no earthly tie could mimic. I have also been privileged to find and revel in that same oneness of spirit in larger settings ranging from "High Church" Episcopal to "Low Church" Brethren to "Loud Church" Pentecostal.
If you are a Christian believer but somehow lack (as I once did) a "taste" for the Lord's Supper, then work to acquire it. May the Lord grant you grace to know the joy of remembering him in the bread and the cup.